"We Lied"

The Scotsman reports that tribesmen in South Waziristan have killed 300 foreign, al-Qaeda-linked militants they had previously sheltered in early March after the foreigners tried to kill a tribal leader.

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"The people in South Waziristan have now risen against the foreigners. They have killed about 300 of them," Mr Musharraf told a military conference on counter-terrorism. "And they get support from the Pakistan army, they asked for support," Mr Musharraf said, in a first public admission that troops were involved.

The incident recalls the sudden shift in attitudes the British Army in Kabul experienced in 1841. One day it was all picnics, gallantry and ice-skating. Then the British defaulted on their goodwill payments. In short order they were fighting for their lives.

By early in 1841, the expense of keeping the Army in Kabul, and the huge monetary subsidies being paid to local chieftains got to be too much, and cost cutting measures were instituted. Macnaghten was told by Calcutta to cut costs, so the first thing he did was halve the bribes being paid to chieftains to keep their tribes from attacking. The reaction was immediate. Some Ghilzai tribes "guarding" the Khurd-Kabul pass, to the east, promptly ransacked and destroyed several caravans heading towards Kabul with food and supplies. General Sale and his column, who were returning to India, had to fight their way through, and ended occupying the fort at Jalalabad, about 70 miles east of Kabul on the road to the Khyber Pass.

Kabul's military situation worsened further that autumn, if that is possible ... On the morning of November 2 1841, Alexander Burnes, his brother, and three other aides, along with their sepoy escort came under attack in downtown Kabul. Burnes had resisted the suggestions of his trusted Mohan Lal to evacuate the city and head for the relative safety of the cantonment. Convinced of his own infallibility and sure of the Afghan's friendship, Burnes watched his brother and the three aides fall to rifle fire peppering their residence. Fires had been started. No one really knows what happened next. One story has him being betrayed by an Afghan who showed up and offered to sneak them out of the riot via a shadowy escape route. The Afghan got Burnes out of the house and then shouted "Here is Sikunder ("Alexander") Burnes!!!" - another story has him almost escaping down the alleyway, only to be betrayed by his own bravado. After nearly slipping away, he turned to yell like a schoolboy at the Afghans burning and looting his house, and was recognized.

Only one man rode in under his own power back to Jalalabad.

The last, Doctor William Brydon, a surgeon in the Bengal Army, his head and hands cut from sabre slashes, and shot three times, rode his faithful pony as fast as it would carry him. At one point, he actually threw the hilt of his broken sword at a pursuer, the useless weapon grazing the Afghan's head and causing him to turn and wheel away. Exhausted and wounded, the pony stumbled on. Late in the day on the 13th of January, a sharp eyed sentry at the fort in Jalalabad spied a lone horse and rider emerging from the rocky valley above the fort. That solitary rider was the messenger of death. With the exception of two or three Indian sepoys, the prisoners and senior officers Elphinstone, Shelton, Pottinger, and Eyre, along with Lady Sale and a few other women and children, he was the only survivor of the over 16,000 souls who had left Kabul barely a week earlier.